The business of providing cellular telephone service has been fraught with bad debt and cash flow problems. These problems have been so severe that they have limited profit margins for some cellular carrier companies and limited the customer base to demonstrably credit worthy, even though the demand for their service has remained high.
There are two primary reasons for the difficulties in providing cellular telephone service.
First, the cellular telephone service carrier companies must deal with a cash flow problem which is beyond their control. This is due to a billing cycle that is much too long to exercise any effective control over customer payment. The cellular telephone service carriers do not receive full account call detail and toll billing on a more frequent basis than once per month. At that point, it is possible for very high bills to have been accrued by customers, deliberately or inadvertently. In the case of the former, the bill is often never paid, which amounts to fraud. In the case of the latter, the customer is not prepared to pay the bill, which leads to a long payment cycle and suspension of service to the customer. The data is generally provided on paper and sometimes magnetic tape. The information remains unavailable until the end of a batch cycle, which prevents a minute by minute inspection of call detail. At this point the information is batch processed, usually after the billing month is over. Generally, a cellular company received revenue from customers one month after the service was first provided.
Secondly, the inability to distinguish valid from invalid cellular telephone numbers allows for cellular telephone fraud.
Without this timely account balance information or a means of determining that a cellular telephone number is a valid one, cellular telephone service carriers have no expedient means of data analysis, resulting in effective control over when a cellular telephone is operable and when it is not.
Related cellular telephone systems are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,301,223 and PCT US91/03583 also owned by the assignee of this application.